Restoration of hair that has been thinned or lost due to disease, baldness, drug treatment and other causes may be restored through a variety of pharmaceutical, surgical, hair augmentation and other means. Pharmaceutical means may use a drug treatment approach to increase hair growth by reducing factors that interfere with such growth. For example, men with Male Pattern Baldness (i.e., androgenic alopecia) may be given drugs that reduce or interfere with the production of the enzyme that makes androgen dihydrotestosterone (DHT), which is known for causing Male Pattern Baldness.
The surgical means generally takes hair follicle transplants or hair-bearing skin grafts from a donor portion of the patient's scalp and places them into the recipient or hair loss scalp areas. This treatment, while generally considered the most expensive and invasive of the hair loss treatments, is considered the most permanent and is generally used for significant hair loss and/or physical reconstruction (e.g., for burn victims.)
Hair augmentation could be seen as a temporary and mechanical enhancement of existing hair to increase the cosmetic appearance (volume, length, thickness, and the like) of the person's head of hair (or other hair areas, such as eyebrows, etc.) by fastening extensions (e.g., extra human hair or artificial hair-like materials) to individual strands of the person's hair. Hair augmentation by extensions can be achieved through a variety of attachment means such as weave, adhesive and other means. When adhesive-bounded extension hair augmentation methods are employed, the extensions are glued to individual strands of the person's natural growing hair. The type of adhesive and the resulting quality of attachment used may be critical in these situations. If adhesive is non-uniformly applied to individual strands of hair, the resulting cosmetic effect is less than pleasing, leaving a noticeable non-uniform and unnatural effect. Further, depending on the adhesive use and bonding method, as the adhesive degrades it could allow for the separation of augmenting hair or projections from the host hair that also lead to a noticeable non-uniform and unnatural effect.
Of the adhesive-binding extension methods, the hot or cold fusion technique appears to have the most natural and realistic result. The fusion techniques use a protein-based (i.e., keratin, the same protein of which hair strands are made so as to generally avoid damaging the hair during the gluing process) polymer resin adhesive to attach extensions to the individual hair strands. The hot fusion techniques uses a resin adhesive that is fixed by a heat source (e.g., a curling iron.) In that the heat source cannot be applied to the base of the hair near the scalp (e.g., burning the scalp in the process) limits the hot fusion attachment of the extensions to the middle to tip of the individual hair strands. The cold fusion technique uses a resin adhesive that is activated by high frequency sonic or sound pulses (operating at frequencies substantially undetectable to the human ear) and the like. This allows the cold fusion technique to connect the extensions to the base of the individual hair strand for a superior feel and effect to the enhanced hair. Other activation types of polymer resin adhesives may be also used for extension attachment.
The fusion technique in generally can be seen as being a very labor intensive, manual operation application method (and hence time consuming and expensive) wherein the cosmologist or hair treatment professional isolates subject's hair into sections. Within the respective hair section, the cosmologist (generally assisted by the use of magnifying optics) then isolates a single or individual strand of hair one at a time. Once so isolated, the hair treatment professional then generally applies with a very small brush the desired fusion binding adhesive to the single hair strand. The hair treatment professional may then takes an extension, again one at a time, and affixes it to the glued portion of the hair strand. In this manner, multiple hair extensions may be attached to and augment the individual hair strand. This process is then repeated for other strands of hair with the section. Once the extensions are suitably affixed to the hair in section, the process is repeated for other desired all the described hair sections. When the hair extension attachment is completed for all the hair sections, the hair treatment professional may then use an appropriate method of finalizing the bonding of applied adhesive (e.g., heat, ultrasonic source, etc.) to finalize the bonding (e.g., “fuse”) of the attached hair extensions to their respective individual hair strands to substantially complete the hair augmentation. Depending on the subject and desired result, the fusion hair augmentation process can take up to several hours to complete in order to provide a cosmologically pleasing result. The overall process to both the professional and subject may be tedious, time-consuming and costly.
What could be needed is a hair augmentation system and method that can consistently and uniformly applies and bonds hair extensions to respective individual hair strands, several hair strands at a time and still provide a long lasting, uniform, realistic and natural looking filled-out hair. Such a hair augmentation system could comprise a binding comb, an adhesive applicator and its adhesive tray and an extension applicator. The extension applicator could have an extension assembly connected by an ejection assembly that is attached to a handle. The extension assembly could have a set of spaced-apart vertical extension grooves, each extension groove receiving a tip of a hair extension from a tube bank removably attached to the top of the extension assembly. Each tube of a tube bank containing a hair extension. The extension tip could then be threaded into each respective extension groove's top lever and bottom lever that movably attached to a top and bottom of respective extension groove. Each lever can be manually rotated/lifted away to allow the tip to go between the lever and the extension groove. When released, the levers could help removably retain to the hair extension tip to the extension groove. A trigger assembly supported by the handle could move within the ejection assembly a pin plate holding set of operative pins. The operative pins so moved through the extension assembly could open the levers releasing the extension tips and further pushing the respective extension tip (e.g., as bounded to an individual hair strand) out of the extension groove.)
The adhesive tray could apply an extension adhesive to a set of spaced-apart adhesive tips as supported by the adhesive applicator with set of extension grooves. The adhesive tray could then further support the extension applicator so that when the adhesive applicator is generally moved in the tray, an individual extension adhesive laden tip will enter a respective extension groove to apply glue to the extension tip held within the extension groove.
The binding comb could be applied to a section of a subject's hair to removably clamp down upon and hold in set of single hair strands in a manner (e.g., a single hair strand held between a pair of comb prongs) that holds the respective individual hair strands in the spaced-apart positions from one another that matches the orientation of the adhesive applied extension tips in the extension assembly's set of extension grooves. The extension applicator is then brought into removable connection to the binding comb so that a respective adhesive applied extension tip comes into contact with respective hair strand held by the binding comb. The activation of the trigger assembly then opens the levers and may further to push out the hair strand/extension bound combinations together and out of their respective extension grooves. As the extension applicator the binding comb are then generally separated from one another, the individual hair strand pulls its attached extension free from the extension assembly. The binding comb may also releases its hair strand/extension combinations to be generally removed from the scalp/hair section.
The system may be reloaded with a new extension-loaded tube bank to substantially allow for the repeated attachment of extensions to additional hair strands. When subject's hair is generally augmented by hair extensions as desired, suitable steps as generally known by those skilled in the art may be undertaken to generally cause the final fusion bonding of the extensions to their respective hair strands. In a manner, the hair augmentation system and method may be seen as being faster, less expensive, less tedious but of the same high quality of the older hand-applied extension attachment process.